The paper investigates theoretically and empirically the role of courts for contract enforcement in transition agriculture. We develop a theoretical model, based on the costs and benefits of court enforcement that captures the boundary between contracts to be judged as court "enforceable" and "not-enforceable" and, simultaneously, identifies the threshold of taking legal action. The empirical analysis based on a survey of 306 Polish hog farmer conducted in 1999 strongly supports our model.